Kelefa Sanneh

As the civil-rights era receded, his personal heroism loomed larger. But movement politics didn’t easily translate into party politics.

How the mayor of Newark is working to revive his city.

Everyone’s headed to Nashville these days, but no one is as comfortable there as he is.

“Está Dañada” was a hit—and a demonstration of the rising importance of two overlapping musical domains. One was the frictionless world of streaming, where there are scarcely any limits to how widely a song can spread. The other was the world of Latin music, which was once treated by the American recording industry as a peripheral enterprise but increasingly occupies a place near its center. In the late twenty-tens, a visionary from Puerto Rico known as Bad Bunny began reeling off a string of da…

I used to never think about Billboard But now I’ve started thinking again Wondering ’bout whether I think I deserve commercial success A decade ago, Charli did not seem like someone who needed to wonder about that sort of thing. She was twenty-two when she released her second album, “Sucker,” at the end of 2014, by which time she was riding the momentum of a trio of hits. “I Love It,” a 2012 collaboration with the Swedish duo Icona Pop, was a worldwide phenomenon, reaching No. 7 on the Billboar…

There is a name for the cruel, and correspondingly clandestine, process by which many animals become meat: “factory farming,” a term that is usually wielded as an insult, especially since the publication, in 1975, of “Animal Liberation,” an incendiary book by the philosopher Peter Singer. “In general, we are ignorant of the abuse of living creatures that lies behind the food we eat,” Singer wrote, and he wanted to destroy both this ignorance and the industry behind the abuse. He halfway succeede…

Kirby portrays her musical story as a mutation of a childhood dream. As a girl, she was obsessed with Britney Spears and other pop stars, and convinced that she was destined to become one. She moved to London, from her native Cardiff, and began working as a singer and songwriter for hire; in 2013, she collaborated with a producer known as Kat Krazy on a dance-floor hit called “Siren,” which had a wistful lyric (“Together, we can break down the walls / Can you hear the siren call?”) and a pumping…

“This is the bolo I gave you,” he said. “I know,” she said. “But it looks good with your outfit.” Munsick cinched the black bolo, gathered his band members for a brief prayer, and then headed out to the stage, where four thousand people were waiting. In some sense he was in his element: Munsick is a country singer, and the Grand Ole Opry is a country institution, bringing together stars of varying magnitudes to join in its long-running revue. But part of Munsick’s considerable appeal is that he…

This exchange reflected the peculiar world of the Supreme Court, where highly charged issues are often transformed into complicated technical problems, and where a quaint collegiality reigns. But some people thought the exchange also reflected something else: the influence of a quirky legal podcast called “Advisory Opinions,” which in the past four years has evolved from a genial chat show into a singularly incisive running commentary on the state of American law. Its host is Sarah Isgur, an ext…

Back then, bands such as these were often classified as “alternative,” a rather vague and cringeworthy term that nevertheless turned out to be a pretty good description of Tool, which has spent the past three decades building an impressive following, and legacy, by stubbornly refusing to act the way rock bands are supposed to. Maynard James Keenan, the lead singer, is a soft-spoken but prickly presence: in one old interview, broadcast on MTV Europe, he described his life on tour as “one great bi…